DonutKing wrote:

I've just started playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance and so far I've been really enjoying it. It's like an elder scrolls game without magic and no handholding at all. I haven't really hit any bugs so far, but I think I'm still fairly early in- just finished the quest involving the charcoal burner's camps, now I'm taking on bounties for killing bandit leaders. I hope it will only get better with the new patches.

Yep there's lots to like - I spent the first 10 hours or so just wandering around looking at stuff, going for walks in the woods, etc. The quests seem interesting enough too from what I've seen so far - this is going to be one of those games that I come back to for years I suspect. It's the first game since GTA5 that has me wishing I had some hotter hardware to run it on - I'm hoping that performance will be improved over time as they patch it.

leileilol wrote:

Installing 3.20 last is important because installing the expansions will overwrite Quake2's EXE/DLLs with an older version (there is no checking there) and 3.20 is the final official patch which came after both expansions..

(also it's important to not use certain source ports that replace the missionpack dlls because some 'fix' and 'undummy' things that alter the game balance like the Disintegrator to the point of mandela effecting that back in history to a newer generation (as it was a scrapped overpowered gun originally ifdef'd out for a very good reason))

Thanks all! I'll start over and make sure to patch last. Noticed that in the Reckoning it "halts" for a few seconds but resumes (does this every so often). Maybe patching last will help it, we'll see.

After finishing Lords of Xulima, I'm auditioning a few RPGs as my next: Anvil of Dawn, Stonekeep, and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. I haven't played an RPG in real DOS in awhile (Realms of Arkania - fall of 2017), and I'm chomping at the bit to get back on that platform. Right now I'm leaning towards Dark Sun because I'd get to use my MT-32. 😎

Still playing through Unreal but getting closer to finishing it. I'm on the Na Pali Haven map which is roughly 2/3 through the game.

I've been playing Icewind Dale (EE). Never finished the original, I'm hoping this time I'll get to the end.

clueless1 wrote:

Still playing through Unreal but getting closer to finishing it. I'm on the Na Pali Haven map which is roughly 2/3 through the game.

Be on the look out for some of the weirder secrets in these maps. Took me awhile to figure out the deal behind all the secrets areas in the 1st half of Sky Town.

I've been making my way through the story mode ("Weapon Master") in Soul Calibur II on my 'new' original Xbox. I've played tons of the original on the Dreamcast over the years, but never bothered with any of the story stuff, so this is new to me.

To be honest, 95% of the story segments can be summed up as "You arrive in the new town. A group of thugs blocks the road and challenges you. You step forward to administer the beat-down..." but hey, it's a fighting game. 😜

Incidentally my years-old Dreamcast muscle memory still works on the Xbox. Including the trick of holding the controller up-side-down to get more fingers on the ABXY buttons & direction pads, with my thumbs on the triggers. Anyone else do this?

I've been stuck between a rock and a hard place lately with work grinding me down and a house renovation upending everything - 'post apocalyptic' best describes my mood so some version of Fallout was in order. I've been playing FO4 on-and-off since release so I tried to get back into that but as amazing as the world is, I just can't seem to get into the questing at all. It has no soul. So it's back to New Vegas for me, one of my all time faves.

Mods are still being released / updated for this game and I've expanded my list to over 20 this time - nothing much in the way of gameplay tweaks because it's great as-is, but it's looking much prettier than it did in 2010:

Well, I'm getting close to finishing Unreal Gold, and started Dark Sun: Shattered Lands a few days ago. But today I randomly started playing Inca and I think I might try to see it through. It's one of those games I bought on floppy when it was released in 1992. I still have the floppies (sadly, the box and documentation is gone), and have had it on my DOS PC for awhile. Decided to play for a bit and cleared the first section. This is one of those games that gives you a random save code each time you clear a level. We'll see if I continue to play it through, but it's been a fun blast down memory lane so far! Great music and very good graphics for 1992. Game play is hit and miss though...

Inca is a pretty.... weird game.

Wasn't there a CD version with additional content?

DracoNihil wrote:

Inca is a pretty.... weird game.

Wasn't there a CD version with additional content?

I'd go so far as to call it bizarre. It seems almost drug-induced. Yes,there was a CD version, but I bought it right when it came out and at the time it was floppy only.

anyone else here play Continuum

In the middle of: The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel, played on AM486 DX4-100.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Files_ … Sherlock_Holmes

Cute and cinematographic, like a real Holmes movie. Never finished, when I was a child... I can remember me playing it on my old Olivetti M300.

clueless1 wrote:

Yes,there was a CD version, but I bought it right when it came out and at the time it was floppy only.

Oh boy there isn't just a CD version.

There's a CDi version too!

Though yeah, drug induced indeed. Whoever heard of Spanish Galleons flying through space like that? Let alone Spanish Conquistadors in space.

A couple years ago I got a stack of free PS2 games, including some very well-regarded RPGs. I never got around to trying them, but since I got the PS2 out to mess around with on my new HD component monitor, I decided to give them a go.

The first up was Xenosaga - I don't have the first game(*), so I tried Xenosaga II. This looked great - sci-fi setting, mechs, Namco, cool box art, huge world. I slit the original seal on the top of the DVD case 😜 and popped it in.

I was immediately dropped into a ten-minute-long unskippable cutscene with some of the most monotonous, agonizingly slow voice "acting" I've ever seen. What the hell is wrong with that delivery? The characters are getting attacked by aliens and they sound like they're on morphine. Absolutely no attempt was made to make the models lip sync, making it look like a 1960's Godzilla movie. Yes, I know I'm playing the English version and the original dialog was Japanese, but even Soul Calibur II got this right and it's a freaking beat-em-up.

After slogging through that, I finally got some gameplay! Well, sort-of gameplay. You walk your mech down a straight road and every three seconds it rips the control away to give you a heavy-handed tutorial on gameplay elements or fighting mechanics, or whatever. Okay, fine, I need to know that stuff. Get through that tiny morsel of actual player control, and suddenly BAM! Another 10 minutes of cutscenes, three in a row back-to-back this time. Nope.

I really wanted to like this, it has some really cool looking graphics for the PS2 and awesome synth music (I did notice the big Korg logo on startup!) but it just wouldn't let me in to play any of it.

(* Ironically, what looks like Xenosaga 1 up there is actually a promo DVD movie comprised of only the cutscenes. It's still in the shrink wrap and I think I understand why. Why couldn't they have made a version the other way around, with only the gameplay & a single page of text now and then to advance the story?)

So after wasting half an hour of my life, out came Xenosaga II and in went Grandia III. Again, I don't have the first two so I hoped this would stand alone. Looks like a cutesier presentation & steampunky atmosphere rather than a sci-fi epic. I can live with that, and besides, it's Square Enix. If you leave the intro screen sitting for a minute, it goes into a goddamn rock music video that's honestly kind of awesome. Yeah, I can get into this.

I knew what to expect by now, so I started a new game and yep, 10-minute ride through cutscene town. This one had at least some attempt at expressive voice acting (although by no means is any of it good) but seemingly went out of its way to establish the characters as utterly unlikeable stereotypes and didn't give me any good reasons to want to spend tens of hours in their shoes.

I finally got into the gameplay, and hey, you can free-roam around and look at things, so props for that, but your first "quest" is to go find where your wife hid some crucial part of your airplane so you can sneak out of your shitty marriage like a little snot. Facepalm.

Not sure I'm going to bother with the Final Fantasy games just yet, I actually have fond memories of having fun with X-2 at a friend's place back when it was new, but she'd already done the beginning-game grinding & cutscene gauntlet and I was jumping into her game when I was over.

I know some of these are beloved and have huge followings, but this was just painful and left me wondering why anyone would want to play these. Did you guys have the same experience or am I nuts?

What happened to just dropping the players into the gameworld and letting them figure out what the hell was going on for themselves??

Anyway, after all that I ended firing up Soul Calibur on the Xbox instead, and stabbed people with swords for like ten minutes. Then I had to quit & get some stuff done. Thanks for wasting my limited gaming time, RPGs.

I've never felt drawn to console RPGs. Not sure why, just doesn't seem right.

There's a few console RPGs I have enjoyed, admittedly not too many though. I've recently been playing "Lagoon" for the SNES, I enjoyed that title in the early 90s. I enjoy Final Fantasy VIII as well (although that did see a PC release).
Dragon Quest VIII is my favorite RPG of all time, and that's for the PS2.

On the other hand, I'm currently playing Wolfenstein 3D because why not. I've been digging through the source code trying to understand how those damned secret walls worked anyways. I never wrote a Ray Tracer before 😎

clueless1 wrote:

I've never felt drawn to console RPGs. Not sure why, just doesn't seem right.

Same here but I can't put my finger on why either - something about the controller and casual physical position perhaps? RPGs should have you hunched over a keyboard / mouse in the dark with maybe just a dim lamp on until late in the night. I have a copy of Phantasy Star for my SMS that I keep meaning to get serious about but never seem to.

I'm still roaming the wastes of Fallout New Vegas. One of the many things I like about it is that the world is of course a mess, but it's a lot more orderly than the other (recent) Fallouts. It's set 200 years after the end of the world so you'd expect that humanity had found time to clean up a bit, and they have in NV. People have found themselves viable things to do, as people generally do.

I never actually finished Unreal back in the day and now that I've go it running on my Windows 10 rig from my original CDs, I'm having another run through.
The game still looks great, especially the sky and I can easily see why it was stunning when it first came out, especially on Voodoo II SLI.

Splinter wrote:

I never actually finished Unreal back in the day and now that I've go it running on my Windows 10 rig from my original CDs, I'm having another run through.
The game still looks great, especially the sky and I can easily see why it was stunning when it first came out, especially on Voodoo II SLI.

Best of luck, it does seems pretty long for a FPS (seems like I've spent more than 25 hrs on it so far). Last night I got onto the mothership, so only a few levels left til I finish it.

Unreal was an unbelievable game in its day. I played it to death. I should give it another play.

I guess based on conversations in other threads It's time for a replay of Ultima VII 😎